Cicada Press is a New York City based publishing imprint founded in 2013 by Matthew Whitley and Anastasiya Osipova. Cicada is an artists run press, dedicated to poetic texts, art projects and works of non-fiction by artists and writers situated in the radical left. The poetry of the slogan. The lyricism of the banner.

Pinocchio Gone Limp

'Too successfully policed & so I have disappeared to we. Given a title & so we have taken them all. Us having tunneled with the shovel of I in guerrilla action. Across the bow!'

A collection of poetry composed of old forgeries and poorly worn masks by Matthew Whitley. The book opens with the striptease biometrics of the “authentic” poet, Matthew Whitley: his fingerprints, date of birth, social security number, and signature. Next, the curtain slowly rises to reveal multiple aestheticized folds of personality, exposed yet disguised under the make-up of four pseudonyms.

They are arranged into a small parade of such wooden boys: militants, pompous poets, mystics of sorts, all brimming with bravura, ideological zeal and adolescent posturing; epaulets gleaming in the sun – a military jacket thrown over bony rachitic shoulders. These pre-programmed characters gain dimension precisely through insistence on their lines. They lean on the awkward support of an exoskeleton composed of what Bakhtin would describe as the “word of another” – external language of bureaucracy, mysticism, ideology – yet Whitley manages to impart to them the urgency and vulnerability of a living heart. Theirs is a real virtue born out of home-cooked self-aggrandizement.